Kanan Makiya is a leading Iraqi dissident and intellectual and author of the Democratic Principles Working Group report for the State Department's Future of Iraq Project

From The New Republic
April 7, 2003

I look at the images of soldiers and armor filling the landscape of southern Iraq, and the images of ordinary Iraqis fleeing or surrendering or just living in squalor, and I think of what Michel Aflaq, the founder of the Baath Party, wrote more than half a century ago. "Al-qawmiyya hubb qabla kullu shay'," he entitled one article, or "[Arab] Nationalism Is Love Before Anything Else." What fiendish kind of self-love is this that brought us Iraqis to such an apocalyptic end?

The nationalism that Aflaq had in mind was a fiction rooted in the myth of the political unity of the Arab world. That myth that could only be sustained at the expense of the very real Iraq that I grew up with--an open, inclusive, pluralistic, and intellectually vibrant nation--and learned to love. The Iraq I knew is still there, formally delineated the way it has always been since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. But I look at the images and ask myself how much of the reality of Iraq, the substance underneath the form, has been lost because of how the Baathists pursued their myth to its deathly conclusion of permanent war. The transition to something better in Iraq--democracy--is about politics only in a secondary sense. It is primarily about recapturing that lost spirit of Iraq, that elusive idea which the Baath labored so hard to extinguish. For a democracy to emerge out of its swaddling clothes, those who are about to inherit the legacy of the Baath in Iraq must lay out, methodically and carefully, step by step, what needs to be done to reclaim the Iraqi-ness of Iraq. The totalizing and suffocating idea of ethnic love, in its Arab form, must finally give way to celebration of difference in a newly reconstituted Iraq. Which brings me to federalism.

Federalism is a new word and practice in Arab political culture. Its novelty is a reflection of that of the whole phenomenon of the post-1991 Iraqi opposition, an opposition grounded not in issues of "national liberation" from the vestiges of colonialism, but hostility to home grown and self-created dictatorship. This new opposition encompasses diverse traditional and modern elements of Iraqi society, and it has not always been easy to deal with. It is fractious and famously prone to infighting. Nonetheless, it is remarkable that virtually all groups in opposition to the Baathist regime agree on the need for representative democracy, the rule of law, a pluralist system of government, and federalism. The Kurdish parliament in 1992 and the Iraqi National Congress in 1992 and again in 1999 committed themselves to this policy; these historic votes broke the mold of Iraqi politics. Today, most Iraqi organizations that oppose the regime in Baghdad, whether they are in the INC or not, advocate one or another interpretation of federalism.

However, neither the Kurdish parliament nor the INC have specified what they mean by "federalism," nor have they worked out its practical implications, especially with regard to the mechanics of power sharing and resource distribution. As a result there has arisen a purely utilitarian argument for federalism, one derived from a pragmatic calculus of what the balance of power in the immediate aftermath of Saddam's overthrow is going to look like. For the Kurdish political parties, federalism is often reduced to the condition for staying inside a new Iraq--not because they view federalism as a virtue in its own right, but because the regional situation does not allow for an independent Kurdish state. Without a federal system of government, in which real power is divided according to non-negotiable constitutional prescriptions, the currently autonomous northern region, largely Kurdish, will yearn for secession. After all that the Kurds have suffered in the name of Arabism--such as the Anfal genocide of 1987-88--no Iraqi democrat should expect otherwise. The Arab corollary to this argument goes: One must concede federalism in the interest of getting rid of Saddam and because the Kurds, though not able to secede, are today in a position to force it upon the rest of Iraq. Federalism, the argument goes, is therefore the best that can be hoped for.

I do not think that a project as big as restructuring the state of Iraq on a federal basis should be undertaken on the grounds of this kind of utilitarian calculus. No ordinary Iraqi citizen can be expected to opt for federalism on grounds of expediency. Federalism, if it is to become the founding tenet of a new beginning in Iraq, must derive from a position of principle. What might that be?

The Transition to Democracy report produced for the London conference of the Iraqi opposition in December 2002 proposed that federalism in Iraq be understood as an extension of the principle of the separation of powers--only this time power is being divided instead of separated. Federalism is from this point of view the thin end of the wedge of Iraqi democracy. It is the first step towards a state system resting on the principle that the rights of the part, or the minority, should never be sacrificed to the will of the majority--be that part defined as a single individual or a whole collectivity of individuals who speak another language and have their own culture.

Yet this redefinition alone will not redress the mistake of Michel Aflaq, which led to Saddam Hussein's butchery. If the constituent parts of the new Iraqi federation are defined ethnically, we will revert back to the deadly logic of "nationalism is [ethnic] love before anything else." The prospect for ethnic warfare and domination will cement itself into the Iraqi politics of the future, foreclosing on the prospect of Iraqi social regeneration. The alternative to nationality and ethnicity as a basis for federalism is territoriality in which geography rules. The point is not to diminish or dilute the Kurdish-ness of a Kurd, or the Arab-ness of an Arab, but to put a premium on the Iraqi-ness of everyone, and therefore establish equality of citizenship. Each separate region will receive its share of national resources--including oil revenues--according to a constitutionally prescribed formula, based primarily on the relative size of its population. At this very moment, Iraq contains the practical framework for such a formula: This is what in effect is going on in northern Iraq through the offices of the United Nations' Oil For Food program. The idea would be to extend a variation of that formula to the whole of Iraq.

A federal arrangement on a territorial or administrative basis actively seeks a mixture of nationalities, ethnicities, and religions in each region--not their separation. The idea must be to have complete freedom of movement, of people and capital, and of property rights, regardless of the region in which one chooses to settle. Any other basis would severely undermine the economic, political, and social development of the country as a whole. There is a temptation already manifest among some Iraqi nationals to cloak ethnic or national arrangements in territorial garb. This vestige of Baathism must be resisted at all costs. In the end, it is worse than an open declaration of federalism on purely or openly nationalistic criteria--in no small part because it will invite regional meddling in Iraq's internal affairs.

There is a logical corollary of this basis for federalism, and it must be faced. It is the reconsideration of Iraq as an Arab state. Hitherto, Iraq's Arab character has been fundamental, driven by the logic of Iraq being ruled by a party that calls itself the Arab Baath Socialist Party. Can the new federal state of Iraq be an Arab state in the same sense in which Baathist Iraq is thought of as being an Arab state? Is the future federal state of Iraq going to be one in which a Kurd or an Assyrian or a Turkmen or an Armenian is denied access to the highest offices of the land?

If the answer to such questions is no, then that means that even though we Arabs form a majority in the country, and that Arab culture and Muslim history will always be cherished in Iraq by virtue of that majority, the majority status of Arabs should not put them in a position to retain privileges of any sort over any non-Arab Iraqi. As I said in Salahuddin, at the conference of the Iraqi opposition in 1992, why not a state whose head of government is a Kurd? Now that would be something.